Cryptoregulation
One of the most common critiques of blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies is that the market is completely unregulated - and hence can be used to fund criminals, insurgents and violent fascist militias like ISIS. However, decentralization is one of the core principles of the blockchain, allowing for public peer-to-peer verification without the need for a 'central body' (e.g. banks, governments, universities) to provide the final consensus. Decentralized Regulation Proponents of the 'cryptoregulation' model argue that the only acceptable compromise for regulation of blockchain technology is to incorporate the regulation into the blockchain in a way that is transparent and maximally decentralized. Examples "A cryptocurrency exchange in Japan reportedly experienced a temporary glitch last week that suddenly offered investors their pick of coins for the low, low price of zero dollars. ... Reuters points out that the glitch couldn't have come at a worse time for the Japanese cryptocurrency exchange business. Following the recent $500 million heist at the Japanese exchange Coincheck, two separate industry groups have agreed to form a self-regulating body that would strive to protect investors with stronger safeguards. It would also, presumably, demonstrate to authorities that they don't need to get involved. The Japanese yen is by far the most exchanged national currency in the Bitcoin world, so attracting regulations would have a global impact." - |Gizmodo:/Glitch On Bitcoin Exchange Drops Prices To Zero...> Benefits Proponents argue that regulation can improve trust in blockchain technology, which is currently beset by negative associations with illicit criminal activity and Ponzi-esque inflationary growth (with the increasing energy usage - and global warming impacts - that come accompany it). Cryptoregulation can not only provide ample benefits to the blockchain community, but the input of ordinary people can become pivotal to developing fair regulation, providing jobs for people from all walks of life in developing a regulatory system that works for everyone, rather than just the 0.1% of people that inflationary capitalism serves. Self-Regulated Advertising Smart contracts that can allow a content producer to support other organisations by advertising their content and earning a commission on sales driven by the producer's clicks (either with or without identity tracking). When a content produceer uses the content of other artists in their material (e.g. YouTubers using copyrighted music) then smart contracts can be used to redirect advertising funds to the artists who have been featured and auditors can assess an appropriate split. Self-Audited Tax Can ensure that any nodes earning an increasing value over time can have their taxation level to fund the local grid increased in real-time to ensure that no Tax returns ever need to be organised or filed. Smart contracts encode all local tax laws, and a discretionary extra tax can be hard-coded to provide a buffer for cases of intentional concealment of funds. Public Validation of Private Ledgers Key to the concept is the dual benefits of privacy in the sense of using an anonymized payment service in which your data is not publicly shared (other than the transaction data on the chain - no identification of node owners on-chain) Node owners may need to be identified during ICO's (Initial Coin Offerings) due to Know-Your-Customer law (KYC), however if no profit is being made from tokens then this can be avoided to allow truly free cryptoeconomies - valueless currency. Simply by making rules around how such currency can be generated may establish a value to it, possibly leading to a marketplace for it, hence leading to it needing to be declared as an asset. To avoid this, is not trivial. (more later) Ephemeral Economics offers some solutions to this issue, in that we move beyond 'static currency' and into flows of revenue which are essentially time derivatives of static wealth - only that they can be encoded such that 'hoarding' is penalized in a sort of anti-compound interest that privileges those who spend all of their wealth regularly in ways that benefit their communities and the planet. In order to maintain faith in such an anti-economy - without fearing that it will be overturned and all your wasted wealth suddenly turned into a loss - users need to maintain faith that such a system is of benefit to a global majority of other users (since if people don't benefit from using it, then the system will never disrupt capitalism) Anti-capitalist economics (anti-economics) is one potential use of ephemeral nanoeconomies. However, to prevent criminal fraud without a centralized state-government, requires polylegality - a multipartisan socioeconomy built to resist centralized biases. Carbon Economy Regulation of emissions by tracking economic transactions. Input-Output analysis of carbon-equivalent levels of greenhouse gas emission and environmental pollution. Tracing them to their source and apportioning them out to all industries, suppliers and consumers who profit from said source. Make the externalized costs of pollution and environmental degradation become internalized, so that for every transaction there is a 'carbon karma' associated with it. Make it transparent. Make it visible. Cryptorαdicαlιsm & Cryptopiracy The development of decentralized smart contracts in the late 2000's and early 2010's (Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc.) planted the seeds for the coming Golden era. The cryptorevolutιon was never a certainty, since commercialisation of blockchain by finance and media giants like JP Morgan and Facebook (both announcing their own blockchain research soon after). However, the financial crises and increasing austerity politics of the major world economies create an overwhelming anti-establishment sentiment in the working class populations globally. Both the far-right and far-left weaponize the sentiment and radicalise new generations into their once dismissed ideologies (with the collapse of 'the neoliberal consensus'). "Politics is back." - Stan Grant The ability to develop smart-contracts that allow decentralized trust in regulatory oversight of our labour and employment markets, to distribute wealth equitably between equal actors in a network of 'syndicates' (anarchosyndicalism) or 'companies' (capitalism) etc. Allowing people to exist in multi-parallel economies, with auto-regulation of their tax deductions built-in through smart contracts (making classical accounting methods partially redundant through automation). The waves of automation caused by such a development has potential to drastically increase inequality as vast workforces across poor areas of industrialized countries become jobless during economic downturn, forced into minimum wage labour under increasing austerity and right-wing attacks on public services ('welfare', etc.). Cryptopiracy is largely developed by leftist radicals who saw this automation as the turning point of technological history post-Imperialism. A chance to 'snatch the reins of history' away from the imperialists who have control over weapons of mass destruction (and the means to produce them). Cryptopirates set out to encode social harmony into networks in ways that reflect the aspirations of libertarians, socialists and anarchists in how a post-capitalist economy could function (with or without money, some with or without a 'global ledger' to keep track of when people are abusing the system). Cryptoregulation was the turning point in those universes in which it ends up being developed. With the ability to not only develop trust in the veracity of the block-ledger (blockchain, blockmesh, etc.) but also in its fairness (a much more complex type of trust to develop). The early bull runs of cryptocurrencies leading up to 2017 were eventually plagued with scams and hot air, with hundreds of 'shitcoins' scamming people into investment for a one-hit payoff and sell-out (Ponzi schemes). Developers in the space realised a method of centralizing the network into 'accepted' ledgers/coins/chains was necessary in order to filter out the bad actors. However, since decentralization was the heart of the development ethos of cryptocurrency this paradox remained unsolved until 2019-2020. Enforcing any particular filter on a complex web of possible chains is necessarily a centralized action (it enforces a set of values that asymmetrically filters out chains that fail to meet those values). Even the core function of the bitcoin blockchain (filtering out fake ledgers by the intractability of regenerating a series of blocks with the correct hash values after altering any segment of the ledger) necessarily enforces a central value that chains with less successful hashes (and lower hash-rate, as a network) are less trustworthy than longer chains (more successful hashes, higher hash-rate). The success of the bitcoin algorithm is that it is obvious that the ideal strategy for any small computational actor in the network is to attempt to solve the hash of the next block to be accepted by the wider group. Hence, solving hashes on the longest chain is always favourable to attempting to alter a past block and then subsequently solving additional hashes to produce the longest chain by yourself. The only way to efficiently 'dupe' the network is to control a large enough proportion of the computational hash 'mining power' (global hash-rate) to be certain that you can solve n+1 hashes more quickly than the remaining network can solve 1 (where 'n' is 0 if changing the most recent block, 1 if changing the prior block, etc.) Under the assumption that the network's computing power never becomes that unequally distributed, then bitcoin (and any similar Proof-of-Work blockchain) is secure. Cryptoregulation allows the 'fairness' of a blockchain's security mechanisms to be assessed. There are other ways to make a blockchain secure. By linking the validity of a chains security to the computational power of the nodes that verify it, bitcoin (and other proof-of-work blockchains privilege computational power with dominance over the economy. Cryptopirates formed early sentiments that against the coming wave of automation, it was important to form a resistance model that was anti-thetical to the wage-labour model under post-colonial capitalism. Security of chains verified through certified inputs from validating sources, randomized and benchmarked for control (e.g. have a transaction validated at 5 stages through its history: ensure at each stage the net balance of the transactants does not change - i.e. no double spending or 'cloning') Cryptosyndicalism allowing for the creation of labour syndicates and MaGe guilds, with nanoeconomies allowing transfer of value between individuals to be tracked privately without public (unencrypted) record beyond the hashmesh (validatable, but nearly untraceable). Cryptoregulation allows for the security of preventing such networks to be used for abuse. Encoding in all networks the need to have audit of transactions, both internal and external to syndicates and guilds. * Internal audit: identifiable, being kept in line intra-community, across all of an individuals communities. Behavioural audits not controlled by any 'central authority' (police, prisons, etc.) - community self-governance * External audit: unidentifiable, but viewing of fragments of your data (randomized so that no external auditors see the full data) to ensure no individual piece of data is abusive/violatory. (Prevention of silos - without drastic authoritarian privacy breaches) Syndicates able to form 'audit forces' and labour markets able to develop skill-trees in hash-chains, with the highest ranking members of a trade able to produce tokens that aren't produceable at lower ranks - tokens that validate future projects (e.g. a smart contract that needs a licenced electrician, a joiner/builder and someone certified for an EWP) as an auto-regulation mechanism without a centralized governing authority. The end of centralized authority and the move towards indigenous and community self-governance. Category:Cryptocurrency Category:Blockchain Category:Authoritarianism Category:Polylegality Category:Law Category:Regulation & Auditing